The radical phase of the French Revolution in 1793

The radical phase of the French Revolution in 1793 functions here less as a date in a chronology than as a boundary within the meaning of revolution: it names the upheaval that a sanitized, respectable politics would prefer to exclude. Set against 1789, it marks the point at which revolutionary change becomes inseparable from conflict and the unsettling transformation of social life.

A Boundary Within Revolutionary Politics

The contrast is expressed as a desire for “a 1789 without 1793.” The phrase does not simply distinguish two dates; it exposes the wish to retain revolution’s promise while disavowing its radical consequences. In the account of Esteban Echeverría’s El matadero, liberal political imagination opposes tyranny to the disorder of the lower classes, but its horror at that disorder also reveals a deeper aversion to life in its painful, bodily and unruly forms. The respectable gentleman appears as the exemplary victim, while the poor are associated with the disorder liberals reject. In this reading, 1793 names what the fantasy of a decaffeinated revolution cannot accommodate.

Revolution as Social Transformation

The discussion of the October Revolution offers a related, though distinct, account of radical change. Sheila Fitzpatrick argues that the decisive transformation of Russian society came not in the emergency years of 1917–21 or during the New Economic Policy, when much of the social fabric remained intact, but through collectivization and rapid industrialization from 1928 onward. These policies aimed to liquidate peasants as individual owners and replace the old intelligentsia with a new one. The contrast between Moscow in 1924 and the city ten years later makes the scale of this transformation concrete: by 1934, the texture of social life had changed so thoroughly that an earlier resident might no longer recognize it.

Revolution, Reversal, and Historical Memory

This comparison does not make 1793 a direct cause or equivalent of the Soviet experience. Instead, it places the radical phase within a broader question: whether a revolution’s violent transformation is an accidental deviation from its emancipatory promise or part of the unresolved dynamic that promise sets in motion. The account of Stalinism sharpens that question. On Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interpretation, the revolutionary sequence continued through the upheavals of the late 1920s and ended only in 1937, when the purges were cut short and the Party nomenklatura stabilized as a new class. The radical moment thus remains a contested measure of revolution: it can be treated as an excess to be excised, or as evidence of the transformation that a revolution’s moderation may leave unfinished.